September 2003

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Same-sex marriage makes perfect sense—if you buy North American culture's take on sex and marriage. More than four decades after the introduction of the Pill, hardly anyone now getting married remembers the time when pleasure, procreation, passion, companionship, and parenthood were all intimately knotted into a bundle called marriage. Without those connections, marriage has become an arena for mere self-fulfillment and sexual expression. Even the Ontario Court, in its June 10 affirmation of same-sex marriage, could describe marriage as only an expression of love and commitment. If that is all there is to marriage, why not grant the same legal benefits to committed same-sex couples as to married heterosexuals?

There is, however, an alternative view, rooted in the Bible, in history, in tradition, and in nature. And those of us who see marriage through those lenses can only think of "same-sex marriage" as we think of "fat-free sour cream"—a triumph of the modern, technologically blunted imagination.

The modern spirit has often been devoted to overcoming nature with technology. This has been a blessing when it has nearly wiped out some life-threatening diseases. Unfortunately, it has also synthesized inferior substitutes for real things, ranging from the invention of calorie-free sweeteners to the recent creation of embryos that were genetically both male and female.

That same modernist spirit is at work in the juggernaut that seems bent on normalizing same-sex marriage in North America. May God bless the resistance: First, Matt Daniels and the Alliance for Marriage for promoting the Federal Marriage Amendment. Second, Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R.-Colo.) and her 75 colleagues cosponsoring the Amendment in Congress. And third, commentators ...